[HN Gopher] The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
___________________________________________________________________
The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
Author : samclemens
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-08-13 21:42 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.honest-broker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.honest-broker.com)
| rvense wrote:
| I read once that a passenger in his cab told him "You have the
| same name as a very famous composer."
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I once had Wolfgang Pauli's cousin use my checkstand at the
| grocery store. I noticed his last name because he wrote a
| check. When I asked if was "Pauli like the exclusion
| principle?" he got very excited and hung around for an hour
| just to chat.
|
| I don't miss checks, but that was pretty cool.
| vatys wrote:
| > "I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-
| five hours a week--in other words, three full days or five half
| days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s
| and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by
| working no more than three or four days a week."
|
| Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have
| the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great imbalance
| in cost of living and pay rates, it may no longer be possible to
| follow a similar path and get similar results.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs
| next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life.
|
| I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates
| from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working
| part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week.
|
| Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things,
| but that's a given.
| medion wrote:
| 100% - but people don't want to make those sacrifices. They
| want to live and do what they've always done. It has and
| likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move
| somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative
| endeavour - not many have the courage though.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli
| you experience.
|
| Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for
| the soul, is artistic suicide.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty
| of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.
| financltravsty wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as
| artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier"
| crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their
| environments, rather than create something that
| transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and
| interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral
| cultural value to... civilization.
| bartonfink wrote:
| Lol lmao
| blt wrote:
| I was going to write a more serious rebuke, but I can't
| really do any better than yours
| lalalandland wrote:
| Orchestral music composition and performance is quite
| different from painting and writing. When you are
| dependent on a large amounts of other highly skilled
| people to create and perform it makes it really hard to
| live out in nowhere.
|
| These days internet and digital production can ease a lot
| of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is
| essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to
| create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their
| art. Especially when starting a career it is important to
| meet and see other artists and art.
| _acco wrote:
| You can't participate in performance arts remotely.
|
| Not to say anything about networking, which is critical for
| most arts.
| joe5150 wrote:
| If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order
| to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip
| Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make _any living_ this
| way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that
| allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in
| the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions
| like The Kitchen don 't exist anymore.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in
| order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of
| Philip Glass.
|
| I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable
| areas" -- sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens,
| Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass
| from Manhattan, Kansas?
| baerrie wrote:
| In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have
| strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually
| livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in
| construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to
| fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue
| collar
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get _in_ to
| those blue collar unions in NYC? It 's not at all a "I can
| just show up, with no experience, and convince a business
| owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the
| hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union
| job.
| thechao wrote:
| > I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an
| industry on its way to being blue collar
|
| I can't tell if you think tech or art is going to be blue
| collar, but based on the AI revolution, you should stay in
| tech, or join UA.
| mmooss wrote:
| IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in
| 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying
| to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and
| ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and
| humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those
| things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they
| say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a
| week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.
| jordwest wrote:
| In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the
| devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on
| rationality.
|
| Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn't realise how much my
| "rational" attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic
| pervading secular society. It's like we threw away the god
| part but kept the part where we're all "sinners" until we
| prove ourselves worthy through work.
|
| Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it
| is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the
| world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to
| appreciate.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's simply impossible today, in the same way that my dad was
| able to pay his way through college with summer jobs is also
| impossible today.
| ilamont wrote:
| _Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia_
|
| Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there?
|
| A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new
| tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when
| a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly
| qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades,
| particularly in the humanities and arts.
|
| She noted that among the existing faculty were several tenured
| professors who had been hired in the previous century when their
| respective areas of study were hot. Even though their expertise
| was outdated and students weren't signing up for their classes,
| they were still on the books until they voluntarily retired ...
| or died.
|
| Fresh Air had a great interview with Glass in which he talked
| about his career and the various jobs he had to take as he
| developed his music. He was driving a cab in NYC in the 70s and
| he said it was very dangerous. It's the top interview in this
| list:
|
| https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass
| gedy wrote:
| Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up
| when the population was growing much faster due to the baby
| boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since
| the 1950s-80s.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| but people have more income now - surely working for uber or
| lyft today is the equivalent of driving a cab then?
| antupis wrote:
| Also tenure Glass would have been just different than blue
| collar Glass we had.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In the art world, I'm convinced ignored is correct. Academics
| often have very different goals and produce very different art
| than those outside academia.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The rise of social media and 'smart culture' has led to huge,
| sudden interest over the past decade in all sorts of niche or
| esoteric subjects. Talented people are making a good living at
| math videos, TikTok tutoring, playing instruments on TikTok,
| reaction videos, food videos, etc. In the '90s, if you were a
| 'philosophy buff' your options were limited to academia. Now
| there is a devoted, captive audience for practically anything
| you can think of.
| antognini wrote:
| John Adams wrote in his memoir about trying something similar
| around the same time, but with less success. When he moved out to
| the Bay Area he ended up taking a job as a longshoreman at the
| port. He wrote that he had this Marxist fantasy of laboring with
| the proletariat during the day and composing avant-garde music
| during the night.
|
| But the job left him so exhausted when he got home that he could
| barely read a few pages of a book let alone compose any new
| music.
|
| He didn't really pick up composing again until he happened to get
| a job teaching music in SF.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And Laurie Anderson got a job at McDonalds. But somehow I think
| with her it was kind of part of her art, ha ha.
|
| > Standing behind a cash register in her uniform, Anderson
| became practically invisible, even to her friends. "They would
| come in and I would be like 3 feet away from them," she says.
| "And I wasn't trying to disguise anything. But I wasn't
| supposed to be there, so I wasn't."
| mettamage wrote:
| It's inspiring for sure, and I think this post will have some
| impact on my life. Giving me a stronger/better attitude
| basically.
|
| But I'd like to take a moment for people who live lives like
| Philip Glass but don't have that famous composer label attached
| to them. There are so many anonymous people going through such a
| crazy amount of work that they do and we never hear of them.
|
| I suppose that at least I think of them now.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's good to hear.
|
| Lest you feel any guilt for how you may have felt before
| reading this piece, I have to say that artists are going to art
| -- whether they are successful or not. It's what they do and
| it's something that they cannot stop doing.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| His experiences are completely alien now and not reproducible
| today.
|
| How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without
| extensive training and certifications on your own time and with
| your own money in that very specific field?
|
| How is it possible to not only be able to support your family on
| 3 working days per week, but to find a boss willing to hire you
| as a part time worker for what seems like a high wage?
|
| How was he able to seemingly be unaffected by frequent job
| hopping and employment gaps that today seem to be as
| disadvantageous as having face tattoos?
|
| My own grandfather told me stories of lying about knowing how to
| drive a tractor-trailer, and learning on the job. Now we have
| licensing, background checks, reference checks, and all manner of
| ladder-pulling that is leaving the younger generation without the
| same opportunities.
|
| Another factor that is overlooked is the tradeoff between
| interest rates and employment. The Federal Reserve, by law, must
| target maximum employment first, and then 3% inflation second. It
| flagrantly disobeys this law with zero consequences. For the
| first time since the 70s or 90s, we had a job market that favored
| employees, and all levels of government treated it like a policy
| emergency to stop immediately.
| https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152
| globalnode wrote:
| this is sadly true. as much as i "want" the old stories like OP
| to be true now (they may still be in rural areas i suspect),
| those times are basically over. i suppose one could do jobs
| like fruitpicking (totally unskilled) or other things like that
| but those employers dont want someone fluffing around for 3
| days a week they want your life
| newprint wrote:
| I live in Baltimore, home of Philip Glass (as far as I know, he
| still lives in Baltimore) and a lot of my friends went to a
| famous Peabody conservatory. Even after graduation, a lot of them
| either entirely left music or struggling musicians, who have blue
| collar jobs. I remember going to one the local bars and saw a
| girl working as bartender(she quite attractive), years before
| that, I saw her playing cello in one of the concerts.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born
| smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate
| advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is
| denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as
| unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay
| or feel ashamed of the latter.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Most artists can't make a living from their art. So they do other
| things to supplement that income. Its not glamorous. It sucks.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| I don't get this piece. I don't know who honest broker is but
| I'll take it he's a Philip glass (PG) fan. So I'll start there.
|
| What is the difference between PG doing blue collar work and
| anyone else? Why is PG having to drive a taxi or work at a plant
| any different?
|
| The article seems to want to praise PG by, what I'm reading
| anyway, almost patronizing him. But there is an undertone that
| insults people who have to work for a living and there's no
| glamour there. I doubt I will read a "the blue collar jobs of joe
| nobody" expounding joe's salt of the earth character for having
| to make ends meet.
|
| I'm not posting this with sour grapes, I just genuinely don't get
| what is different between PG working and anyone else working that
| same job that warrants writing about it.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Could a new composer replicate this? is too broad a question.
| Rather,
|
| - could they support themselves with a blue collar job?
|
| - could they support a family with said job, as the primary
| breadwinner?
|
| - could they do it in X, where X is the geographic location of
| the cultural center of their art form?
|
| Glass was lucky enough to hit all three. Today's young artists
| might be lucky to hit 1, and maybe the internet helps with 3 a
| bit, but if you work in an art form that really, really needs in
| person connection (eg theater, or you need to be where the
| gallerists and dealers are), I guess it doesnt solve the problem.
| 2 is very difficult.
|
| The perfect trifecta is when you have a dense urban center that
| happens to be the center of your art form, but still has enough
| of a rough edge to it that you can live and work cheaply. New
| York, 1970s, classical music. Berlin, visual arts, 2000s. Or you
| can create the scene yourself given enough mass and energy (see:
| Atlanta, 1990s, rap, or NYC, 1980s, hip hop).
|
| The next Glass is therefore more likely working in an urban
| coffee shop than a suburban landscaping crew, living with roomies
| or parents rather than alone, has no children or spouse to
| support, and exists on the fringes of a city like London, NY, or
| Berlin.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-17 23:00 UTC)